17 min
Chris Frith on perception, swarm consciousness, and seeing things that aren’t there. Listening with...
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- Arts
I have a prior expectation or hypothesis. This is the evidence. Should I change my prior expectation given this evidence or not?
Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers, and more.
In this episode, neuroscientist and philosopher Chris Frith discusses his work into perception, swarm consciousness, and seeing things that aren't there.
I'm Chris Frith. I'm currently an Emeritus Professor at University College and also a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy. I originally trained as a clinical psychologist, and I then went into research as an experimental psychologist, which was at a very good time, I think ’65 - we were the first psychology department in the country to get a computer. So I started using computers very early and carried on ever since.
I then went to work for the medical research council on a special unit that was interested in schizophrenia. We did a lot of work on schizophrenia and we were particularly interested in the biological basis, where the brain comes in, but I became fascinated with hallucinations in particular and how to understand what on earth is happening when you see things that are not actually there.
I was also able to start doing brain imaging in the first unit in the country where you could do that, which was originally in Positron Emission Tomography, and then subsequently MRI: Magnetic Resonance Imaging. So I did some of the early work using brain scanners, and one of the first things we did of course is look what happens in the brain when you're hallucinating.
As you probably know, the hallucinations assisted with schizophrenia are basically hearing voices. And some people say they’re just making it up. They don't really have voices… but the brain imaging showed that there was really something going on, interestingly in the speech areas. It was as if they were speaking to themselves, but didn't realise this.
When I retired, which was a long time ago, I became particularly interested in social cognition, how people interact with one another, Schizophrenia, and my wife's speciality, Autism, seem to be in a sense, primarily a problem of interacting with other people.
I met Suki Chan through my colleague, Colin Blakemore, a neurophysiologist particularly interested in perception, and we were both working at the Institute of Philosophy when we retired, because that's what you do when you retire, you become a philosopher. Suki was particularly interested because of my work on hallucinations and perception more generally, and what we'd like to call the Bayesian approach, which is to say, actually we're all hallucinating all the time, but in most cases, what we hallucinate corresponds very closely with reality and what goes wrong in schizophrenia, for example, is that what they are perceiving no longer coincides as reality.
I'm particularly interested in artists because art - particularly visual art - is all about how perception works. My colleagues Semir Zeki has gone into this in a big way, talking about what he calls neuroaesthetics, but making the point that many of the developments in modern art, like Op art and so on followed by developments in science where you discover there’s a bit of the brain that’s only interested in movement. There's a bit of the brain that's only interested in colour. So many of these developments take account of how the brain works, which the neuroscientists only discover a few decades later. So that's quite interesting.
There are cultural effects. So we all think we see the world in the same way although we don't. One of the things we’ve noticed about synaesthesia is if you go and give a lecture about synaesthesia, somebody will come up afterwards and say, I am like that. But I thought everybody was like that. We think we're experiencing the world much more
I have a prior expectation or hypothesis. This is the evidence. Should I change my prior expectation given this evidence or not?
Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers, and more.
In this episode, neuroscientist and philosopher Chris Frith discusses his work into perception, swarm consciousness, and seeing things that aren't there.
I'm Chris Frith. I'm currently an Emeritus Professor at University College and also a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy. I originally trained as a clinical psychologist, and I then went into research as an experimental psychologist, which was at a very good time, I think ’65 - we were the first psychology department in the country to get a computer. So I started using computers very early and carried on ever since.
I then went to work for the medical research council on a special unit that was interested in schizophrenia. We did a lot of work on schizophrenia and we were particularly interested in the biological basis, where the brain comes in, but I became fascinated with hallucinations in particular and how to understand what on earth is happening when you see things that are not actually there.
I was also able to start doing brain imaging in the first unit in the country where you could do that, which was originally in Positron Emission Tomography, and then subsequently MRI: Magnetic Resonance Imaging. So I did some of the early work using brain scanners, and one of the first things we did of course is look what happens in the brain when you're hallucinating.
As you probably know, the hallucinations assisted with schizophrenia are basically hearing voices. And some people say they’re just making it up. They don't really have voices… but the brain imaging showed that there was really something going on, interestingly in the speech areas. It was as if they were speaking to themselves, but didn't realise this.
When I retired, which was a long time ago, I became particularly interested in social cognition, how people interact with one another, Schizophrenia, and my wife's speciality, Autism, seem to be in a sense, primarily a problem of interacting with other people.
I met Suki Chan through my colleague, Colin Blakemore, a neurophysiologist particularly interested in perception, and we were both working at the Institute of Philosophy when we retired, because that's what you do when you retire, you become a philosopher. Suki was particularly interested because of my work on hallucinations and perception more generally, and what we'd like to call the Bayesian approach, which is to say, actually we're all hallucinating all the time, but in most cases, what we hallucinate corresponds very closely with reality and what goes wrong in schizophrenia, for example, is that what they are perceiving no longer coincides as reality.
I'm particularly interested in artists because art - particularly visual art - is all about how perception works. My colleagues Semir Zeki has gone into this in a big way, talking about what he calls neuroaesthetics, but making the point that many of the developments in modern art, like Op art and so on followed by developments in science where you discover there’s a bit of the brain that’s only interested in movement. There's a bit of the brain that's only interested in colour. So many of these developments take account of how the brain works, which the neuroscientists only discover a few decades later. So that's quite interesting.
There are cultural effects. So we all think we see the world in the same way although we don't. One of the things we’ve noticed about synaesthesia is if you go and give a lecture about synaesthesia, somebody will come up afterwards and say, I am like that. But I thought everybody was like that. We think we're experiencing the world much more
17 min